It has been noted that psychoanalysis has little to offer either a critical social theory or ethics. I'm only going to put this down. There are, at least, six predominant theoretical frameworks that emerged from the ruins of the enlightenment to carry the flame. I'll discuss all six and then illustrate the vital contribution of psychoanalysis to each - focusing upon the way in which Lacanian psychoanalysis, in particular, provides a more humane and intelligible alternative. Then, after the math, I'll discuss three dominant ethical frameworks and point to a fourth, which is only visible is one keeps the unconscious well in mind.
First, the mighty six pack: new age obscurantism, otherwise known as "bad" theology; postmodern deconstruction; modernist theories of communicative action; transcendental existentialism or hermeneutics of authority; critical Marxism, and essentialistic particularism. If you haven't heard of these it's because I'm making them up.
Some cursory remarks: "bad" theology - openly authoritarian or conservative frameworks which, without apology or explanation, assume the [superior] validity of one historical tradition in an ahistorical manner. John Milbank is an example. This category could include most theological or religiously motivated theorists - from Helmut Peukert to David Tracy and Carol Christ. Although often "reformist" or even "radical" in their claims regarding their specific tradition, their underlying claims, which are self-understood to be universal, are dangerously authoritarian. "I believe because it is absurd."
What can I say about this. I'll start with Feuerbach. Projection projection projection. I'm pretty convinced that most theological approaches stem from Aristotle. Now that's probably not an internal understanding, although if they've read Aquinas there is no excuse. The new age obscurity has to do with a kind of holistic approach... at least the approach claims to be holistic (social theory but begin with / end with God, Gaia, the Cosmos or some sort of faith. However, in order to believe, one must have a belief in belief itself. The claim becomes depended upon itself as a presupposition. Hegel knew this. It is often tied up with a kind of messianic utopianism - a blueprint for a better world. The Cartesian paradigm of subjectivity is superseded by "connection" to God, the earth, or the spirit realm. This amounts to a paranoid dedication to the Other of the Other. Lacan demonstrates why this dedication is psychotic. For Lacan, the Other is always something that can be located. The parapraxis - the slip, break, fragment comes from somewhere (the imaginary, the symbolic...). In "bad" theology, its presence is mysterious (and maintained as mysterious) ("the ways of God are beyond mere comprehension"). In strict Lacanian jargon - the Other of the Other is a fusion of the Real with reality. What we encounter, always already, is mysterious. The movie Thirteen Floor or eXistenZ illustrates this well enough. Is the world real or is this just a game? ("I thought we were still playing!").
Postmodern deconstruction: the darling brain child of a host of theorists ranging from Derrida and Levinas (sort of) to Jane Flax and Judith Butler. Discourse is fiction, the effect of a decentred textual mechanism(s). Subjectivity is likewise.
The subject is dead, the ends of man run amok. Postmodern deconstruction picks up on a (mis)reading of Lacan. Postmodern deconstruction denies the existence of the Freudian unconscious - the idea that there is a unity in the Imaginary. Butler argues that the unconscious is fragmented, in the same way that the symbolic is. This fragmentation leaves resistance a matter of transgression and perversion. The problem with perversion (which Foucault brilliantly points to and disregards depending on which day it is) is that liberation and domination is a zero-sum game. The cause brings about an effect which reinforces itself as cause. In slightly more accurate terms: resistance to power is generated by the very matrix that such resistance seems to oppose. In the end, the subjective is bypassed. The capacity of the individual to subjectivize their predicament is skipped. Perhaps the Alien from the movie of the same name is representative of the postmodern (lack of) subject: pure appearance qua appearance. Ash, the android science officer, describes this best: "I admire its purity." Deconstruction, despite itself, is oriented by Puritanism (didn't see that one coming, eh?).
Communicative Action: Has anyone not heard of Habermas? Habermas shifts subject centred reason to an intersubjective paradigm. Subjectivity is no longer understood in a Freudian vein, rather, as a purely discursive phenomenon. For someone who scolded Gadamer for ignoring power and labour as social phenomenon, Habermas does a good job of doing the same when it comes to constituting the modernist subject.
Oddly enough, Habermas sits proudly with the postmoderns. Subjectivity is constituted almost completely by language and, as he notes in The Theory of Communicative Action, a language that is reified by power and labour. So liberation, in effect, comes out of the postmodern condition of complete alienation. Habermas's quasi-transcendental understanding of language pulls subjectivity up out of the muck using skyhooks, which have only clouds to use as leverage. His game is consensus, which he envisions as a prepolitical. Every linguistic act is always already an act of solidarity (which probably explains why Habermas has never, to my knowledge, written anything about hate speech). As Agnes Heller notes, Habermasian man is pure cognition, without feelings, desire, or body. There is no... poetry... in Habermas. Re-reading Habermas from a Freudian perspective reveals his constitutive error: that identity is constituted aesthetically (dream work) as well as discursively. I try to think Habermas with Hurly Burly, which explores the contradiction of friendship in a Hegelian manner. Speech isn't always communication. Lacan's reading of the Purloined Letter also illustrate that understanding is understanding about something... but what? We don't know, because we agree.
Transcendental Existentialism: the same old thing. I'm putting Heidegger in here. Life sucks, so join a political movement that moves. Here's where we find all sorts of freedom issues - the capacity to choose is a presupposition which is find in some respects and dangerously insensitive in others. AKA: Nihilism. I tossed hermeneutics of authority in here too. Although I'm quite fond of Gadamer, he does uphold a quasi-metaphysical notion of the Good, taken mostly from Aristotle.
The best approach here, is a Lacanian re-reading of Kant. It's not that the law tells us what to do or serves as a testing procedure to determine if our maxims are the right ones. The law, not rendered as an unconscious law, convicts the subject of finitude. Subjectivization then, is the process of taking responsibility for the translation of the unforgiving law into practical advice. As Heller notes, there is no responsibility in Heidegger, no ethics. Why? Because, as Zizek notes, he fails to grasp the practical importance of Kant - that which remains of reality after reality is deprived of its support in fantasy. I'm tempted to mention David Lynch here, whose murmuring red dwarf in Twin Peaks signifies preontological reality... which must find translation through the medium of the Other.
Critical Marxism: those who insist that the illusory freedom of the bourgeois thinking subject is rooted in class division.
"There is no class relationship." Why? Because it constitutes our lived reality, it is in what Lacan calls "the Real." As such, we can only approach it in part. In other words, class derived theory itself is a (failed) attempt to come to terms with the traumatic Real. This is important, so it should not be misunderstood. If we are going to theorize class, it is necessary to acknowledge that class itself shapes our reality. In other words: class struggle is present only in its effects. The attempt to totalize the social field, to assign to social phenomena a definite place in the social structure is always doomed to failure. If one is caught in the effect, in the trauma, the aim is not to uncover the source (as if this was possible) but to engage directly the excess. We cannot penetrate the obscure origins of power because we should not. For, upon finding it, we end up in the most authoritarian position of all: the tyrant. The one who *knows* beyond a shadow of a doubt. Perhaps we can take hints from Dark City. The hero discovers the truth, and rebuilds the world, in *his* image, complete with the lighthouse / phallus on the dock (an omnipotent spoiled god). Plato's metaphor of the cave is also relevant here. The philosopher king steps out into the sun and sees reality as it actually is. And (doubting) Thomas Anderson from the Matrix - who sees through the Matrix (steps out of the cave) and then returns to drag everyone else out of it with the final telephone call.
Essentialistic Particularism: This has to do with theorists who focus on particularity but do so in a essentialist manner. One might consider Irigaray or Benhabib in this category - who argues that the allegedly sexless cogito is in fact a male patriarchal formation.
The problem here is one of fetish. The particular, and we find this in Benhabib as well, becomes fetishized. The so called "concrete other." The problem is simply this, as Jay Bernstein notes in his Hegelian critique of Benhabib: the "other" is the Other precisely because it lacks a voice. Simply making the other concrete, whether through reciprocity or universal respect, does not bring this voice back (as if it was possible to institutionalize the voice of the Other). Irigaray strategy of parody (miming the crucifixion) or Benhabib's strategy of communicative ethics is not enough to salvage this. In part, because, as Lacan notes, "the Self is already an Other." And the attempt to essentialize the Other in the particular runs contrary to the very liberative impulse. Negative dialectics is not a program. I suppose one might be looking for a movie ref here, eh? Ok: The Haunting. The earlier version presents a modernist tension, where the 'ghosts' are never seen... the postmodern version, the recent re-release, focuses upon the particularity of the horror - special f/x.
******** ethics
Here it is. Three ethical frameworks dominate contemporary debates about moral philosophy: ethics of justice, ethics of the good, and postmodern ethics of responsibility.
All three are a variation on the same theme: the GOOD. Ethics of the good (communitarianism, aristotelianism, republicanism) establish one good as the good. This is negated by ethics of justice (rawls, habermas) which takes this good and proceduralize it. this is negated by postmodern ethics of responsibility which supports a plurality of narrative strategies. All fail because each one presents an underlying "hard" kernel: the good.
So, with Lacan, a fourth alternative arises: the ethics of the Real. Ethics as a view from the perspective of evil. What Lacan's framework possesses that the others lack is an awareness of contingency (historical) and finitude. Subjectivity is not conceived of as either solid or non existent rather, as empty (filled by political, social, and historical contradiction). Nuff said.
In short: only psychoanalysis, thus far, grasps the paradox of modern subjectivity as an absent centre.
My point here isn't to lay down an authoritative groundwork for the future of critical social theory, not to promote psychoanalysis as an exclusive field of inquiry. Rather, to point out that significant theoretical insights are made possible from this perspective. This is not a final word. Far from it. Laclau and Mouffe have also theorized this in relatively non-psychoanalytic terms - in terms of political antagonism.
just a perspective (swiped from pg. 1 of Zizek's The Ticklish Subject), ken